Ur

Before dirt.

Dear Word Detective: Newsweek and the NY Times have both recently used the word “ur-text” in articles with no indication of its meaning. Example: “Principals had ordered Payne’s books and DVD’s by the boxload, mostly her ur-text, ‘A Framework for Understanding Poverty,’ . . .” What does it mean? — Kate Simpson.

Well, what do we mean when we say, “What does it mean?” Do we mean “What is the literal meaning of the word?” Or do we mean the meta-meaning, the cultural significance, of “ur”? And what, after all, is “meaning”? “Meaning” is subjective, of course, but “meaning” is “meaningless,” so to speak, without collective agreement on its objective value, which is almost always less than five bucks.

OK, onward. What “ur” means, in a cultural sense, is that you have stumbled over a line of cultural demarcation, the one separating folks who nod knowingly at buzzwords like “heuristic” and “semiotic” and “trope” and “ur,” and the rest of us schlubs who have to look this stuff up. “Ur” is, at least when it’s used in the mass media, the sound of a writer showing off, and I, for one, find it intensely annoying. Academics, of course, are free to torture each other with this stuff (knock yourselves out, please), but the rest of us just wanna read the paper before the parakeet needs it.

What “ur” means in a literal sense, used as a prefix (ur-text, ur-cow, ur-toaster, etc.), is “original or earliest,” with the sense that the ur-thingy presages or underlies what comes later. “Ur” is a German prefix found in several German terms imported into English and used primarily in scholarly and scientific contexts, e.g., “Ursprache” (“sprache” meaning “speech”) or proto-language, and “Urheimat” (“homeland”), the place of origin of a people or language. One of the earliest uses of “ur” in English was in the early 20th century in “ur-Hamlet,” the long-lost 16th century play on which Shakespeare supposedly based his version. The use of “urtext” in English dates to the 1930s (“In these volumes … we have the nearest thing possible in Chopin’s case to an Urtext,” Times (London) Literary Supplement, 1932), and subsequent use has usually carried the implication that the “urtext” is either a “purer” form than later versions or is the clearest statement of the author’s thesis or vision before the derivative sequels and DVD deals cluttered things up. Kinda like when James Bond was still Sean Connery.

Speaking of early things, by the way, there is (or was) another “Ur,” an ancient city in Mesopotamia thought by some to be the birthplace of Abraham. The remains of Ur, an important archaeological site, can be found today near Nasiriyah, south of Baghdad, Iraq.

12 comments to Ur

Better late than never, I suppose.
As far as I remember, ‘ur’ or ‘uru’ simply means ‘city’ – in Sumerian, I believe (yes, I’m on the internet and can easily check, but eh, it’s late). For example, the name of ‘Jerusalem’ is probably ultimately detived from Uru Shalem, ‘city of Shalem’ (said Shalem was one of the local gods).

I’m running about a year late here but it’s worth noting that in addition to pedants, science fiction fans would have run across ur- in the Thomas Covenant series (where I picked up the word as a child).

I’m reading a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau de Marot, about language, translation and anything else he could think of, in which he uses ur to denote the original – as in ur-dog and ur-joke. So there can be an ur-anything. You can use the little critter in front of just about anything if you are trying to impress people who will be impressed by such things.

UR: on a whim I looked to see what is written about UR this ltr combination. In English we pronounce this YOU ARE and we have URLs on the internet as in YOU ARE EL & EL is GOD It seems these bits of letters combinations are not random as in UR of the Chaldees, Abraham and the ONE GOD it is like DNA

Worth pointing out that in Thomas Covenant the term isn’t used in the sense of original. Rather in the sense, as I read it anyway, of ‘similar but not the same’. For example Thomas as Ur-lord is not the original lord (nor is Berek) but rather an individual who is like a lord but not. Equally the ur-viles are not the original but the descendant species